“No man can leave his past life behind him,” answered Gerard. “If you are innocent I am sorry for you; as I should be sorry for any innocent man who had acted so as to seem guilty. I am still more sorry for your wife.”
“Yes, you have need to be sorry for her,” said Treverton, with a quiet anguish that touched even the man who thought him guilty. “God help her, poor girl! We have been very happy together: but if Edward Clare holds our happiness in his hand our peaceful days are at an end.”
They were at the Manor House gate by this time, and here they stopped and waited in silence for the others to join them. Celia and Laura had been talking together merrily, while Edward walked beside them, silent and thoughtful.
John Treverton shook hands with Celia, but he only gave Edward a curt nod of adieu.
“Good morning, Mr. Gerard,” he said, with cold courtesy. “Come, Laura, if Celia has made up her mind to go home to luncheon we mustn’t detain her.”
“Duty prevails over inclination,” said Celia, laughingly. “If I were to come to the Manor House I should forget my Sunday-school work. From three to four o’clock I have to give my mind to Scripture history. How dreadfully absorbed you look, Mr. Gerard!” she exclaimed, struck by the surgeon’s thoughtful aspect. “Have you any serious case in London that is preying upon your mind?”
“I have plenty of serious cases, Miss Clare, but I was not thinking of them just then,” he answered, smiling at her piquant little face, turned to him interrogatively. “My patients are mostly sufferers from an incurable malady.”
“Good gracious, poor things! Is it an epidemic?”
“No, a chronic disorder—poverty.”
“Oh, poor souls, then I’m sure I pity them. I’ve been subject to occasional attacks towards the end of the quarter ever since I’ve been an independent being with a fixed allowance.”
They were walking homewards by this time, Edward in the rear.
“Now, do you seriously think, Miss Clare, that a young lady, living in her father’s house, with every want provided for, can know the meaning of the word poverty?”
“Certainly I do, Mr. Gerard. But I must tell you that you start upon false premises. Young ladies living in their fathers’ houses have not always every want provided for. I have known what it is to be desperately in want of six-button gloves, and not to be able to get them.”
“You have never known what it is to want bread.”
“I’m not particularly fond of bread,” said Celia, “but I have often had to complain of the disgusting staleness of the loaf they give us at luncheon.”
“Ah, Miss Clare, when I was a student at Marischal College, Aberdeen, I have seen many a young fellow walking the street in his scarlet gown, gaunt and hungry-eyed, to whom a hunch of your stale loaf would have been a luxury. When a Scotch parson sends his son to the University he is not always able to give him the price of a daily dinner. Well for the lad if he can be sure of a bowl of porridge for his breakfast and supper.”
“Poor dear creatures,” cried Celia. “I’m afraid Edward spends as much money on gloves and cigars as would keep an economical young man at a Scotch University—but then he is a poet.”
“Is a poet necessarily a spendthrift?”
“Upon my word I don’t know, but poets seem generally given that way, don’t they? One can hardly expect them to be very careful about pounds, shillings, and pence. Their heads are in the clouds, and they have no eyes for the small transactions of daily life.”
After this they walked on for a little while in silence, George Gerard thoughtfully contemplative of the fair young face, with its mignon prettiness and frivolous expression.
“It would be a misfortune, as well as a folly, for a man of my stamp to admire such a girl as that,” he told himself; “but I may allow myself to be amused by her.”
A minute afterwards Edward Clare came up to him, and took him by the arm.
“Well,” he said, “what passed between you and Treverton?”
“A good deal, yet it amounts to very little. I am sorry for him.”
“Then you do not believe that he killed his wife?”
“I don’t know. It is a profound mystery. I should advise you to let things take their own course. What good will it do for you to make that poor wife of his miserable? If he is guilty, punishment will come sooner or later. If he is innocent, it would be a hard thing for you to persecute him.”
“What, do you suppose I am such a milksop as to let him go on his way unquestioned? I, who have loved Laura, and lost her? Suppose him even innocent of the murder—which is more than I am ready to believe—he is guilty of a cruel fraud upon his present wife, of an impudent fraud upon the trustees to Jasper Treverton’s estate, of whom my father is one. He has no more right to yonder Manor House than I have. His marriage with Laura Malcolm is no marriage. Am I to hold my peace, knowing all this?”
“To reveal what you know will be to break Mrs. Treverton’s heart, and to reduce her to beggary. Hardly the act of a friend.”
“I may
